Across the Pond

by Terry Eagleton

  And by God he was useless too.

  There is a sense in which this is an anti-American story. For one thing, it represents a smack in the face for sentimentalists, of whom there are a good many in the United States. For another thing, it appeals to populist feelings only to deflate them. It panders to the champions of the Common Man, then turns on them with its last breath and leaves them disconcerted. Like a good deal in Irish culture, it builds up lofty expectations only to undercut them. It is also typical of that culture in its perversity. It promises to gratify our desire for a conventional upbeat ending, then pulls the rug out sadistically from under our feet. It trades on our liberal-minded assumption that appearances are no sure guide to reality, only to reveal that the fiddler is every bit as inept as he looks. Like a lot of Irish humour, the story is latently aggressive. It represents the revenge of those with a secret grudge against self-satisfied, smoothly predictable narratives. In typically Irish vein, it is about failure, not success, and failure as comic rather than as tragic.

  Rather as the Irishman Oscar Wilde’s epigrams take a conventional piece of English wisdom and rip it inside out or stand it on its head, so this tale takes the traditional fairy story in which the beggar becomes king and leaves him even more of a loser than he was in the first place. In all these ways, the fable resembles not the humour of Americans in general but of American Jews in particular. It is not for nothing that the hero of the finest Irish novel ever written, James Joyce’s Ulysses, is called Bloom. The fiddler joke works by bathos, one of the most typical of Irish literary devices. Hacking the world savagely down to size is a familiar Irish pastime. Deflation and debunkery are among the nation’s favourite pursuits. In this, Irish culture is very different in sensibility from the United States, which has been so generous to the country over the centuries. Debunkery is too negative an act for many Americans to feel easy about.

  The Irish can be negative in the sense of satirical, but not in the sense of complaining too bitterly when things go wrong. This is partly because they live in a country which within living memory hovered somewhere between first and third worlds, and which has recently tipped back towards third-world status again. Life is thus not expected to be highly streamlined. Transport timetables, for example, are sometimes largely decorative, with only a loose relationship to observable fact. But the Irish reluctance to complain is also because it is imprudent to stand out as a trouble-maker in a small country where everyone knows everyone else. The British complain rather more, and have much to complain about; but they do so in a muttering, shamefaced sort of way, in case other people might complain in a muttering, shamefaced sort of way about their complaining.

  Both comedy and tragedy are about coming unstuck. The difference lies in the way we respond to this debacle. Comedy is the art form which understands that coming unstuck is fairly commonplace. It is part of everyday existence to trip over your own feet from time to time, to fall apart at the seams, or fail to live up to your own grandiose ideals. If you do not aspire too high or expect too much, however, you will never have far to tumble, and will never be too crestfallen. By keeping your head down, refusing the seductions of greatness, you can survive. You will never be a saint or a conqueror, but your failures will be minor ones. In classical tragedy, those who aspire and fall make more of a splash because they tend to be privileged, heroic types. Comedy, by contrast, is the anti-heroic mode of those who accept the inevitability of things going awry, and have learnt to be stoical about it. It avoids the afflictions of tragedy by sacrificing its splendour. Comedy settles for half, tolerant and disenchanted, sceptical of all wide-eyed idealism and passionate intensity, adept at the art of compromise. It is not a cynical form, since it believes in the reality of human value; but it believes that such value is best preserved by not making too much of a fuss about it. It is a very British way of seeing.

  Like comedy, the British are traditionally suspicious of the success ethic. Unlike Americans, they are not an affirmative nation. Among their national icons are a ship that sank (the Titanic) and a calamitous military defeat (Dunkirk). Defeat is what the British are particularly good at. They are maestros of utter disaster. No doubt there are bunkers deep below Whitehall where intensive seminars in how to screw up are secretly conducted. Glorious defeats, like the Charge of the Light Brigade, are almost to be elevated over stupendous victories. The British are not proactively heroic, but brave out of necessity. Unlike Americans, the only kind of heroism for which they have a sneaking admiration is one forced on you when the odds are hopeless and your back is to the wall. After such sporadic bursts of self-sacrificial glory, they resume their normal, grumpy, unheroic existence until the next catastrophe happens along. They need the occasional hardship in order to show what stuff they are made of, and suspect that American civilisation is too easy and flaccid in this respect. The States may be full of virile, chisel-jawed, bestubbled types, but all those stretch limos and Jacuzzis are fatally weakening. This is ironic, since quite a few Americans see the British themselves as effete. This is largely because their accents can sound vaguely gay, rather like their prose styles.

  The British are no enthusiasts of extremes. They are not convinced that truth is what shines forth when you are driven to the outer edge. This can happen from time to time, as when German submarines are sinking your supply ships, but it is out of the ordinary. It should not be taken as a measure by which to characterise everyday life. The real self is the everyday, middle-of-the-road one. It is one that lends itself to the novel, a form at which the British have been adept, rather than to epic or tragedy. The British value freedom, for example, but tend to suspect that Americans make too much of a song and dance about it. Charles Dickens records in his American Notes an encounter he had with a doctor who insists he has no intention of leaving America. “Not yet awhile, Sir, not yet. You won’t catch me at that just yet, Sir. I am a little too fond of freedom for that, Sir. Ha, ha! It’s not so easy for a man to tear himself away from a free country such as this is, Sir! Ha, ha! No, no! Ha, ha! None of that, till one’s obliged to do it, Sir. No, no.” The doctor turns out to be a Scot who has only been in the country for three or four months. The national rhetoric is clearly contagious.

  The middle of the road can be a dangerous place to stand. You are likely to get run over from both directions. It can also be an illusion. What is the middle way between racism and anti-racism, or tickling someone as opposed to torturing them? Even so, middle-of-the-roadism, which in Britain is almost as much an object of veneration as Manchester United, is probably less perilous than the sharper kinds of polarity one finds in the United States. Good guys and bad guys, for example. There are, in fact, no entirely good guys, which is not to say that there are no saints. It is just that saints are by no means entirely good guys. The Catholic Church allows that even they can have bouts of wrath and twinges of lust. Perhaps there are no completely bad guys either. Even monstrous despots weep over their sick children. The British believe that life is mixed and muddled, a view of the world that is exemplified by their weather. It is a supreme example of the pied and dappled nature of things, their chanciness and unpredictability, the way you can never really trust life when it is running smoothly because sunshine turns so often to showers. It is a metaphor for the nation’s mentality.

  The British are fond of sayings like “It takes all kinds to make a world,” “There’s a bit of good and bad in everybody,” and “It would be a funny world if we all thought the same.” Fist fights can sometimes be avoided by telling your opponent that he has a right to his opinion and you have a right to yours. It is surprising how often this piece of threadbare liberal wisdom can prevent a punch in the face. It works partly by implying that people should leave each other alone, which the British are usually delighted to do. The British “muddle through,” meaning that they achieve their goals but don’t quite know how, and might just as easily not have done. The role of accident and approximation in human affairs is ruefully acknowledged. Things in
the States are more conscious and clear-cut, rather like the layout of some of its cities. The aim is less compromise than achievement, so that you hatch your plan and put it efficiently into operation. The only problem with this is even if you do not mess it up, reality will probably do so for you. Such, at least, is the view of life across the Atlantic.

  Grumbling and Grousing

  The fact that the British are always grousing might suggest that they are gripped by a dream of perfection. But this is not so. They grouse largely because they enjoy doing so, and would be at a loss if their complaints were all to be satisfied. One reason why they talk about the weather so much is that it is often pretty bad, a fact from which, as chronic masochists, they reap a morose kind of pleasure. It also allows them to grumble without getting too personal in their protests, thus risking a broken rib. Since nobody is likely to take a bitter harangue about hailstones personally, one can vent one’s spleen without fear of being physically assaulted. The subject also appeals to the deep-seated fatalism of the British people, since there is no way of stopping a thunderstorm. This, too, is a secret source of self-lacerating joy among the citizenry. The British rather enjoy feeling helpless, as the Americans do not. The thought that there is absolutely nothing one can do is regarded by some in the United States as defeatist, nihilistic and in some obscure sense unpatriotic. In Britain, it brings with it a strange, luminous, semi-mystical kind of peace.

  It is important to note that the British do not just complain about the weather when it is cold and damp. They complain about it when it is hot and dry as well. In their view, too much sunshine is almost as offensive as a tsunami. The British are not in general prima donnas, and tend to disapprove of any such capricious behaviour. When it comes to the weather, however, they can no more be satisfied than a pampered rock star who smashes the bottles of Moët & Chandon champagne backstage because he asked for apple juice. The weather, like seaside holidays and overseas football matches, is Britain’s occasion for infantile self-indulgence.

  Another reason why the British talk about the weather so much is that it is one of the few things common to everyone in a socially divided nation. It is also because the weather in Britain is perpetually changing and wildly unpredictable, and thus lends itself to animated discussion rather more than the unwavering heat of the Sahara. Along with illness, it is one of the few dramatic aspects of everyday life. If the country were blessed with a calculable climate, its citizens would be struck dumb. Talking about rain and fog, however, is also a way of avoiding talking about more intimate matters, of which the British are notably shy. (So, indeed, are the Irish, who seem more frank and open than their former proprietors but who have all sorts of secret depths.) Sex as a topic of conversation is of general interest but too revealing, while the demography of sixteenth-century Portugal is unrevealing but not of general interest. So storm clouds and regions of low pressure must serve instead.

  Grumbling in Britain is a mild form of social dissidence. It is a way of rebelling against the current order of things without the bother of having to do anything about it, thus blunting the edge of one’s protest with a very British stoicism. It also involves a kind of negative solidarity: one grouses to others who in turn bellyache back, in an anthropological ritual whose gambits and conventions are intuitively understood. Discussing one’s physical ailments in gruesome detail, another time-honoured British pastime, is a similar form of negative solidarity. People take it for granted that doctors are useless and hospitals criminally incompetent, and compete with each other to produce the most blood-chilling medical anecdotes. Accidental amputations, hearts removed but not replaced, eyes left dangling on cheeks, cell phones, pork pies and cigarette lighters sewn up inside patients by mistake: all have been known to figure in this lugubrious one-upmanship. You can be obsessed with illness, however, without being neurotic about it, as some Americans are. The British assume that the body will break down from time to time, and would feel deprived of an agreeable topic of conversation if it did not. A super-efficient health service would plunder the nation of precious grumbling resources, thus leaving people with a lot less to say to each other. Contracting syphilis may be the only way to get to know the people next door.

  Many of the British have an unerring conviction that the future will be different from the present, namely, worse. There are always fresh catastrophes just round the corner. For some Americans, there is also an unimaginable catastrophe just round the corner, but it is known as the Apocalypse and will have a positive outcome, at least for those who believe in it. Even the end of the world is not the end of the world. Some British attitudes to the future could be described as apocalypticism without the religion. History has been in steep decline ever since some indeterminate golden age. The nation’s best days have always gone. To adopt a phrase of Oscar Wilde’s, the British have a great future behind them. Even the golden age was not all it is cracked up to be. Even then, people glanced back nostalgically to some previous paradise. And even in Eden there was a snake in the garden. In the States, by contrast, one frequently hears that the nation’s best days lie ahead of it. In fact, this has probably been a constant refrain since the Pilgrim Fathers. It tacitly acknowledges that the present is not exactly brilliant, but does so in a way that avoids dwelling too despondently on the fact.

  The attitude of the stereotypical British workman illustrates the nation’s generic glumness. Confronted with a blocked pipe or a broken radiator, he will stare at it in gloomy silence for several minutes, hand on hips, shake his head slowly and finally come out with a deep-throated “Nah.” There is, he will imply with funereal satisfaction, absolutely no way in which this disaster can be repaired. After a lengthy period of anxious questioning, in which one is obliged to participate as in some vital ritual at a voodoo ceremony, he will grudgingly admit that there might just be a way of fixing the problem, though it will be fiendishly complicated and insanely expensive. Ten minutes later, the repair will be complete, a modest amount of money will have changed hands, and the workman will have moved on to another bout of Nah-ing and head-shaking elsewhere.

  Nothing could be further from everyday America. The United States is a land where for the most part things work. It is streamlined, efficient, labour-saving and economical. Service in bars and restaurants is prompt, cheerful and efficient. In Europe, by contrast, waiters can go to extraordinarily ingenious lengths to avoid serving you. One suspects they engage in competitions with each other over who can delay delivering food the longest. When they finally appear with your meal, they sometimes look rather older than they did when you ordered it. Efficient service is not a British priority. Indeed, in some pubs and cafés it is regarded as a kind of moral defect. I once knew a Manchester bus driver who devoted his life to seeing how many people he could leave behind at bus stops. He was inordinately proud of this achievement. When I caught sight of him across a crowded pub, he would gleefully hold up a number of fingers to indicate the latest toll of abandoned passengers. British workers do not typically take pride in the outfits that employ them. Not many of them would refer to their companies as “we,” as American workers tend to do. Attempts to induce them to identify with the company as a whole might be greeted with ridicule. They are not especially impressed by Employee of the Month schemes, or chief executives who wear “Rage Against the Machine” T-shirts and ask to be called Sweetie Pie.

  Failure and Success

  Unlike the British, Americans do not generally take a doleful delight in breakdown and failure. This is because they are trained to admire achievement. They can thus be less envious and begrudging than those for whom good fortune is as rare as humility in Hollywood. At the same time, societies like the United States which insist on success are bound to produce large amounts of human wreckage. This, however, has been efficiently taken into account. There is a dynamic, fabulously profitable machine for mopping the damage up, all the way from psychotherapy to the churches, mystic mud baths to Indian healing rituals. One part of the system
reduces people to burnt-out shells by seeking to pump too much profit out of them, while the other part reaps a profit out of trying to stitch them together again.

  The behaviour of a nation is influenced by how big it is. When it comes to a civilisation, size matters. One can speak freely of one’s triumphs in the States because success is generally applauded, but also because there are so many Americans that a lot of other people are likely to have chalked up achievements as well, and envy is thus less of a problem. In small nations like Ireland or Norway, backbiting and resentment are rife, since there are not enough people around for many of them to stand out as exceptional. The few who do excel are thus at dire risk of being cut briskly down to size. Egalitarianism in the States is a virtue, and so it is in Sweden, but in smaller societies it can be a negative value as well. It means that nobody should have the nerve to get above anybody else. Getting on is regarded as rather suspect, and if you are ill-starred enough to be a billionaire banker or world-class clarinet player you would be well advised to conceal the fact. The more you soar, the more you should keep your head down. The best policy is to rise without trace. Familiarity breeds scepticism: people know their neighbours too well to believe that their good fortune is truly deserved. You should fit in with your fellows, not seek to outshine them.

  The British habit is to efface the ego, whereas the American one is to assert it. This, at least, is what the formal ideology of each nation requires, however remote it may be from the behaviour of their citizens. There are plenty of arrogant Brits and self-lacerating Texans. De Tocqueville remarks that Americans have turned egoism into a social and political theory. In Britain, self-effacement is bound up with the ethic of service. You are not to consider your own selfish interests, but to subordinate them to the Crown, the Empire, the defence of the realm or the common good. Those who do so are a privileged elite, and the ethic of service, while real enough in one sense, is also a way of masking this privilege behind a cloak of selflessness.